For the past ten years, I have been losing my identity.
I have been saying ten years for the past three years, but now that I am 21, it really is ten years. Since I was 11. Since adolescence. Since my first menses. Since I was raped. I have been lost.
I have been trying to find myself and have been looking in all the wrong places.
I do not like meeting new people, particularly in the dating sense. That getting-to-know you process where they ask, so, what do you like to do, what are your interests, what are your hobbies. My heart starts to race, my hands go cold, my tongue turns to lead and I start to panic.
Despite having rehearsed in therapy how to respond quickly and then switch the focus of the conversation back to them, I still find the situation to be awkward and unsettling. It still leaves me feeling like less of a person.
Who am I? Where does my time go?
I was an active child, well rounded and heavily involved with many interests and activities. Sports, music, friends, games, imagination, reading; never a dull moment, even when I was alone, which was rare.
When adolescence came my way, all I wanted was to be alone. I abandoned all my interests and all my friends in favor of my notebooks and the radio, made new friends and kept my ear attached to the phone for five hours a day. After two years of that the phone calls stopped and darker things began.
I would wake up, maybe take a shower, return to my room only to spend the rest of the day listening to music and reading, perhaps writing and occasionally talking on the phone. Every now and then I would venture out for things I should not have been doing to myself. This was the pattern for two years. For two years I did naught but escape.
When I was 16 I ventured to another country and I continued my escape there. I still had the same interests and behaviors, the same attitudes and problem: I was running away and hiding. I was just hiding 3500 miles away from where I was hiding before. When I finally came back, I moved to Pittsburgh and tried to hide there. Arvin would not let me.
Arvin saved my ass.
Arvin was the one who made me come back to DC and get some real help. He got me back in touch with my anger — something I had not allowed myself to feel — and back in touch with wanting to help people — something I had fallen out of touch with, as I was so trapped in my own head. Suddenly I had interests again.
If it were not for Arvin, things might be very different in many respects. People can make or break you, and Arvin was one of the ones who made me. I live every day of my life now trying to live up to the gift that he gave me. Sometimes I fail. Most days in the past year, I think I have succeeded.
When you are depressed, most people are hesitatant to speak the truth to you, to use harsh words. Years later he apologized for our interactions, but I would not have wanted him to change his words if we could go back and relive them.
With everyone else pussyfooting around me, he was not afraid to get in my face and tell me to snap the fuck out of it and to get angry. To stop wishing and to start doing, to stop worrying and to start learning. \”Riot grrrls don\’t feel sorry for themselves, riot grrrls kick peoples asses\” or whatever the comment was.
He motivated my pathetic ass back into life, and though I was too mad at him at the time to give him credit for any of it (it took me months before I calmed down and realized what he had done for me, and then even longer before I started to work up the balls to approach him and thank him for actually succeeding in rescuing me the way he had said that he would. We are on each other\’s friends lists now, though we do not talk, and I do not have the balls to reach out any further to reinitiate the friendship; as much as I would like to, I am still tongue tied.), he was the one that made it all happen. Sure, something else could have been the catalyst, but it may have taken much longer than it did.
Because of Arvin I was able to start to become a functioning person again. Back in DC thecounterculture.com came alive. The rest is history — and therein lies the problem — it is history because I let it go when Chris left me and I could not handle it. I never brought it back up to speed and then let the domain expire, and now that moment in time that we all shared, that flurry of activity is gone. It was great while it lasted, eh? We had fun, no? That was my interest.
Perhaps I have grown out of that, grown beyond that. I wonder these days what my interests are. I wonder what to do with SEF. I wonder what to do with myself.
I have known since I was 13 that I wanted to provide a space for people, for teens and twenty-somethings. I have known that I have wanted a big family that I can support and care for. I have known that I have wanted to be well educated, respected, well liked, wanted and needed for who I am and what I have to offer.
I have not known how to get from point a to point b. I have often tried to jump from point a to point b without doing all the groundwork in between, and that is just not feasible. I have often times been so scared of never being able to have the things that I truly want that I look into alternatives, such as working with computers or breaking off perfectly functioning relationships because I am convinced that there is no point in getting my hopes up.
The last few years I have managed to acquire a few shallow interests, most of which center around the computer. Site design, writing, the businesses, more writing, researching, wanking for inspirating, general time suck. Eighteen hours a day behind the box, year after year. Is it any wonder I developed carpal tunnel? But none of it really interests me anymore, I have dropped most of the projects and I am left with a great deal of time on my hands.
Now I am not sure what my interests are. I do not know where all my time goes, with no projects to work on. When the mania subsides I am left with about fourteen hours a day — fourteen hours that just slip through my fingers. Where does the time go? What the hell is it I am doing all day, and why do I always feel so pressed for time now when I never did before?
The last time I really had a set schedule I was thirteen — eight years ago. In the gap between now and then I made my own rules, lived by my own routine, was my own boss — even on those rare occasions when I had an outside job. Those outside jobs never lasted long, anyway; the longest was eight months of misery, ending in a bed ridden depression. That was when I started contracting out with web design and screenprinting to make ends meet. Financially I was set, but I do not think I had a moment of enjoyment aside from when I would leave town to visit friends.
These days I am much better equipped at keeping myself entertained, but I still find myself lacking. Instead of rereading the same few dozen books over and over again, I am reading new books when I remember to sit down and read. My social circle has widened but now that I am no longer manic I find that I have to force myself to actually venture out to see people — \”Cassandra, you must leave the house; it is neither normal nor healthy to have gone three days without seeing anyone but doctors\”.
People are teaching me about their hobbies and I find them fascinating, and yet I still have not found anything that I can latch onto myself and call mine. I feel a twinge of jealousy towards people who have these things that they like to do, that they put time, money, and effort into and get pride, excitement and joy out of.
All I know is that I am so fucking introverted and that I am still at the point where I am trying to figure out who I am and what I like, and I know that I sit back and observe while I wish I was participating. I have grown to like observing; I have grown to like it a lot. I am not sure, though, that observing life counts as an interest when everyone else seems to be a part of the action. I cannot very well observe life while home alone on a Saturday afternoon, either. I need other interests, I just do not know what they should be or how to find them.
Well, there is no rule book that says I have to have my life all figured out by 21, right? Right. I just have to stop feeling so out of it when people say \”so Cassandra, what do you like to do in your free time?\” and smile and say \”why, you of course, darling, now would you like studded or ribbed?\”
